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Rating: Only a few bands can have their very first concert listened to, the first cry of what for some lucky ones has become a long and award-winning musical career. Litfiba is one of these.
This bootleg is a faithful testimony of what happened on the evening of 6/12/80 in the famous "Rockoteca Brighton" club. Litfiba, in front of a few lucky ones, among whom were Nicola Vannini and Federico Fiumani from the "cousins" Diaframma and the future drummer of the band Ringo de Palma, were giving their first official concert. The lineup included the very first drummer Francesco Calamai, and the rest of Litfiba's historic lineup: Ghigo Renzulli on guitar, Antonio Aiazzi on keyboard, Gianni Maroccolo on bass, and an eighteen-year-old Piero Pelù on vocals.
But let's talk about the bootleg: the recording is (miraculously) of excellent quality, even better than many later recordings, and, indeed, the hisses, the sound that sometimes comes and goes, the keyboards with a much higher volume further enhance the idea of what the concert must have been, the debut of an underground band with an average age of 20 in Florence in the early '80s.
11 tracks plus a reprise for 45 minutes of music. The historical value in this case far exceeds the musical one: the tracks are very raw and almost monorhythm, played with much more than a bit of approximation, but from which future potentials can already be noted. It's wonderful to hear Piero singing in a little "British" English and inciting the audience with rough screams, or Ghigo complaining to the sound engineer during pauses in almost all tracks about the volume of monitors and speakers and asking the audience to be careful with the speakers, or focusing on the keyboard effect, more similar to a video game sound...
There's little to say about the individual tracks: it starts with the instrumental "Litfiba", with a rhythmic base on which the keyboard weaves chords, followed closely by "Your Body", one of the best among the very first tracks, and "A Satana", the first song put together by the group, with a truly unsettling atmosphere and lyrics about "a front of corpses", "Satan on the cart of human heads" and other such niceties. "Under the Moon" will be the only one to be officially released on the first EP, and even in this version, it maintains its dark aura very close to Joy Division, although the sense of defeat and despair given by Ian Curtis's singing is replaced by Pelù's punk attitude. In the final part, "Il Segnale" stands out, with very evocative lyrics ("I'll drown in liquid cement/helplessly witnessing my downfall") and a slower, more rhythmic melody, "After Death", another strong piece among the very first tracks, where once again Piero's interpretation stands out at the limit of the recited, truly possessed, and Ghigo's equally rough choruses, and "Tonight", which starts with a lively rhythm, then suddenly calms down to become a kind of dark ballad, very evocative.
As already mentioned, the artistic value is what it is, but we are still facing the first step of a band that will later give us far greater demonstrations of its skill.
TRACKLIST:
1) Litfiba
2) Your Body
3) A Satana
4) Mars
5) Under the Moon
6) In My Head
7) Il Segnale (or Elettroflash)
8) H.N.1
9) Control (or Fuck to Your Mother)
10) After Death
11) Tonight
12) Under the Moon (encore)
In reality, in this setlist (which is the one reported on the MC) there is an error, because H.N.1 and Tonight are the same track, so technically track 8 doesn't have a title...
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